It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Manley Whines

On Don Newman's Politics show yesterday Newman interviewed John Manley about his recommendations to the Harprocrites about Afghanistan.Manley complained, predictably, about media coverage of the war. His example was interesting he said a press conference had been set up to show the success of a CIDA program in Kabul, but it happened the same day another Canadian soldier had been killed. He complained that this good news story then got lost while the media covered the soldiers death, his ramp ceremony and his return to Canada.

Now I won't comment on the callousness of this example. Rather I found it interesting that the good news story was Kabul, not Kandahar. We are doing little PRT work in Kandahar, mostly it is support for infrastructure needed for the troops.

Our real aid work is still occurring in the North in Kabul. So why are we in the south. Manley undermines his argument for Harpers War in the South. Instead the NDP is proven right again, we need to withdraw our troops from counter insurgency operations and move them back to the North, to defend the PRT projects that are really what we should be doing. And of course backing the malleable Karzai government in its attempts to come to a peace agreement with the Taliban and Pashtun war lords.

Mullah Naqib shakes hands with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in March, less than two months after the Kandahar elder helped free the main suspect in Glyn Berry’s death.